The U.S. As Honest Broker, the Oslo Accords, the Peace Process, the Two-State Solution: Does ANY of This Still Make Sense Today? Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino, Gary LaMaster and Steve Williamson consider the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and what appear to be the diminishing prospects for a just peace, and the final resolution of a 66 year-old stalemate.
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Product Diversity and Local Business Support Networks: A Promising New Alternative to the Big-Box and Franchise Model of Retailing. Democratic Perspective’s Gary LaMaster and Steve Williamson talk about the benefits of buying locally with Meg Williams Jamison, Northern Arizona Director of Local First Arizona, Justin Ove, National Sales Manager for Arizona Stronghold Wines, and Kelsey Melvin, Local First Arizona’s Community Outreach Coordinator for Northern Arizona. As it turns out,those benefits can often outweigh the lower unit prices that are supposedly the great advantage of the corporate business model.
For example, local businesses keep more of our money in our own communities than large retail outlets like Walmart, or franchises like Applebees or McDonalds do. They also don’t require the tax breaks or infrastructure support large corporations extract from local governments in exchange for locating in our communities. Finally, because the local sourcing of the products they offer for sale is less energy intensive than transporting them from across the country, or across the world, they tend to contribute in the aggregate to more sustainable long-term economic development than the big box stores do.
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American Dream or American Nightmare? It Depends On Who You Ask: Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino reflects on the story of the United States in the Twenty-First Century as told from two very different viewpoints: first, that of Laura Poitras’s film Citizenfour, about the fugitive NSA analyst Edward Snowden, and second, that of his own dismay at the gap between what Candidate Obama once promised, and what President Obama has since delivered.
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Comprehensive Immigration Reform: A Review of Congressional Inaction and President Obama’s Executive Orders. Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino, Gary LaMaster and Steve Williamson discuss the impact of President Obama’s controversial executive orders temporarily regularizing the status of some four million undocumented immigrants. What happens next, and where do the President’s actions fit into the context of our historical ambivalence toward the immigrants who’ve been coming here since well before the United States itself was established as an independent nation?
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The Verde Valley Mental Health Coalition: Community Involvement Makes a Difference. Democratic Perspective hosts Mike Cosentino and Gary LaMaster welcome Barbara Litrell and Judy Maloney, members of the steering committee of the Verde Valley Mental Health Coalition, for a discussion of the mental health issues facing Arizona and the Verde Valley today. Suicide hotlines, support for mental health care for our veterans and in our jails and post-release follow-up programs, innovative partnerships with local government, education and outreach activities at both local and state levels — it’s hard not to be impressed by what these committed volunteers and activists have accomplished, and the great example they’ve set for all of us in the Verde Valley.
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Arizona Public Service, Pinnacle West, and the Arizona Elections: A Case Study in the Influence of Dark Money. Democratic Perspective’s Gary LaMaster and Steve Williamson take on the effect of dark money in the recent Arizona elections. How a private corporation, operating a monopoly public utility, was enabled by a questionable Supreme Court decision to buy itself a regulatory agency which prefers its interests over those of the public it is required by law to serve.
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Campaigning on the Issues: Jim Holway, Democratic Candidate for the Arizona Corporation Commission, and Mikel Weisser, Democratic Candidate for the Arizona State House of Representatives, Legislative District 4. Mike Cosentino, Gary LaMaster, and Steve Williamson round out Democratic Perspective’s 2014 Arizona election interviews by welcoming Jim Holway and Mikel Weisser for a discussion of their respective races. Hear who they are, where they stand on the issues, and how their races look just one day before the voters go to the polls.
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Government Works Best When We Work Together: Tom O’Halleran, Independent candidate for Arizona State Senate, Legislative District 6. Democratic Perspective’s Mike Cosentino and Steve Williamson welcome Tom O’Halleran to the show for a discussion of his candidacy for the Arizona State Senate from District 6. Hear why he’s running again, this time as an Independent, what his positions are on the issues facing District 6 and the state at large, and why, as he sees it, the Arizona Legislature has lost the art of working across the aisle to solve the problems facing Arizonans.
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Felecia Rotellini: Competence, Experience, and Service. Democratic Perspective again welcomes Felecia Rotellini, career prosecutor and Democratic candidate for the office of Arizona Attorney General back to the show. Hosts Mike Cosentino, Gary LaMaster, and Steve Williamson talk to Felecia about the progress of her campaign, her plans for the office once she’s elected, and why the failed prosecutorial priorities of her opponent, incumbent Tom Horne, have put Arizonans, particularly its senior citizens, at increasing risk from predatory white-collar crime.
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Social Policy and the Shrinking Middle Class: Increasing Inequality Is NOT an Accident. Democratic Perspective welcomes author and journalist Sasha Abramsky back to talk about the consequences of the social policy failures outlined in his recent book The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives. How deliberate policy decisions by the leaders of out government and corporate institutions devastated a once prosperous middle class, and turned a constitutional democracy into a brutal and largely unprincipled plutocracy reminiscent of the Gilded Age of the 1880s and 90s.
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